SOURCE: Sandler, Florence. “The Unity of Felix Holt.” In George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute, edited by Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, pp. 137-52. London: Macmillan Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Sandler examines the characters Esther and Rufus Lyon and the radicalism of Felix Holt, arguing for the unity of the novel's domestic and political themes.

The commentators on Felix Holt, the Radical have fallen for the most part into two groups, each more or less dissatisfied.¹ There are those who, taking their cue from the title, expect the book to have a radical hero with effective political as well as personal quality, and the action to entail a modern political analysis of the structure of personality and society. Such readers are likely to conclude that Felix is an ineffective radical and ineffective hero, and that the action falls apart from that defective centre.

Then there are...